Trees are turning, politicians are jamming your phone texts with election slogans, Comic Con 20 is celebrating Coney Island, and hundreds of murals are in full effect this fall in every borough of New York City. We’ve been riding bikes through the streets to find new stuff and give you some of the best that makes this NYC.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, legal and otherwise, this week featuring Cram, Ejek98, El Cekis, Hektad, Jappy Agoncillo, Jim Power, MCY, Minhafofa, Mosaic Man, Motomichi Nakamura, OG King 157, Optimo NYC, and WC.
Mr. Power is a well known ceramic tiles artist whose work can be found primarily in the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan, NY. The Mosaic Man as he’s better known has been working on his installations in the East Village since the early 1980s creating a trail of tiles installations on urban furniture and the bases of street lamp posts. We were surprised that some of his work has been vandalized and in some cases completely destroyed. We can’t make any sense of why and who is responsible for the destruction of public art that contains an oral and visual history of the city and contributes to the dynamism of the city.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Many street artists and graffiti writers have stayed away from painting new works these last few months because winter has been so brutal and relentless in New York. Grey has been the predominant color so far this year.
So you have to expand your vision to discover something new if you are trekking through our dirty old town. Travel to new parts of the city, and consider how space is occupied by creativity in other ways, like the community murals full of historical heroes of the culture, and like the ‘casitas’ our photographer, Jaime Rojo, shot in Harlem this week. This city never stops surprising you, and art on the street is sometimes not what you might narrowly define it as.
We start the collection with a shot of CALDE’s piece from Caldetenes, Spain, during the FACC festival. Thanks, Calde! Perhaps this is our first sign of spring.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, including Andre Trenier, Calde, Caryn Cast, D30, Delude, Dzel, El Cekis, Garuma, Jaurelio, Living Relic, Mena Cereza, Outer Source, Peak, Qzar, Rams, and Zwon.
In New York, casitas are small, Puerto Rican-style structures built inside community gardens—part porch, part clubhouse, part cultural anchor—created by residents who reclaimed vacant lots and remade them as places for music, meals, dominoes, gardening, and neighborhood life. They also belong to the world of folk and vernacular art: handmade, improvised, often built with recycled materials, and carrying memory, pride, and everyday aesthetics rather than formal architectural polish; that is one reason photographers such as Martha Cooper have been drawn to them for decades.
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime set tapped into the same visual language by placing a brightly colored “casita,” modeled on traditional Puerto Rican homes, at the center of a mass-media spectacle, turning a humble form of domestic architecture into a symbol of cultural identity and belonging. Some are protected here in New York, but not all: Casita Rincón Criollo in the Bronx became nationally recognized through historic preservation efforts, while many other casitas remain vulnerable unless they have specific legal or community-based protections.
Happy Halloween Ya’ll! More than your average number of freeks, misfits, and naughty school girls with fangs on the subway this week, did you notice?
As if any of us need to conjure more scary scenarios than the daily horrors we face – bomb threats, traffic on the FDR, Meghan Kelly.
Anyway, stay safe out their this week peeps.
So here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1UP Crew, A Cool55, Bla Bla Meow, Clint Mario, El Cekis, Harlem Picasso, Javier Barriga, Kobra, Lin Logic, Phoebe NY, Stikman, and XO Homeless.
Aretha Franklin’s voice was on many radios and car stereos in Brooklyn yesterday. You could hear her riding on the Freeway of Love from a passing delivery van on Flushing Avenue, rocking steady at a barbecue in Marcy Projects, saying a little prayer for you out through someones’ open window in leafy Fort Greene.
There was other music on the street to be heard, sure, – it was a sunny summer day in BK, ya’ll. But Aretha kept appearing, and reappearing, taking us to church, and sometimes bringing us to tears. Her impact on the streets was felt because of her indomitable, soaring and searing voice giving voice to women of color and because of her respected work in civil rights dating back to Martin Luther King Jr. – at times when being proud to be black was a radical act all by itself.
May Aretha’s voice never leave our streets because even though many changes did come, many of us still believe real change is still gonna come. The Queen of Soul is gone, but her soul lives on!
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Alien Mail, Captain Eyeliner, El Cekis, Ghost Beard, LMNOPI, MenaceTwo, Mr. Dis-Satisfied, Osiris Rain, Patch Whisky, Reza Piece, Sipros, Stray Ones, and Trap.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
